Thread of Wonder, the next 5000 posts: science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction 2021 and beyond

But a few of them have stayed with me all this time and some I read elsewhere later. Table of contents of the first one still looks really good today. Feel like I forced myself to finish that PJF story, but was a bigger fan of some of his other stuff.

I think of "dated" as being like confined, stamped, done, but agree that *somewhat* dated/pleasantly/pungently musty can have its own antique charm, even allure---like I recently finally read this aaancient pb of Ballard's Chronopolis I've had for maybe 20 years, from a thrift store, and the lesser stories, liberated from cold print, would make awesome basis for 60s-early 70s anthology TV (there are also several classics/killers).

“Dated” SF can often have a hauntological effect, if I may.

Read my second Robert Charles Wilson, Blind Lake. It was ok, definitely absolutely not at all hard SF despite the talk of bose-einstein condensates. Felt somehow less satisfying that The Chronoliths even though it didn't play the same trick of unasking all the questions set up at the beginning. Read a bit like an airport thriller in parts. Oh well I bought Spin as well so he's get one more go from me.

There was a good interview with him on Geek's Guide To The Galaxy this week

possibly this is due to my sources of info, but it is striking how almost every hyped SFF novel of this year has an LGBTQ+ angle or three

which is totally fine, some of my best friends, several of my recent favorites (baru cormorant, gideon the ninth, micaiah johnson) etc. etc.

but it is striking

I'm reading Kingsley Amis' The Alteration - the only Amis (K or M) I've ever read. I wondered it might turn out to be just a sort of genre exercise but I'm getting into it. Neat title (referring to both the counterfactual crux of the alternate history, and the potential castration of the young choirboy protagonist!) He drops a few contemporary names which makes you wonder if after 500 years of alternate history would mr & mrs hockney still have got together and had a son called david who became a successful artist? But it's just for lolz. Some of the church stuff goes over my head for sure, I'm not the keenest student of church history.

Oh and re: Amis, has anyone read New Maps of Hell? I passed up an opportunity to buy an original copy from a charity shop the other day.

yes, i've got a copy. it's a good critical survey of its time, written by young Amis - ie, an intelligent and articulate critic, more enthusiastic, less snide than older Amis. the future warnings are there though - a fear that science fiction is increasingly being treated as 'literature' with a cumbersome set of critical and creative expectations. amis responds very well as an intelligent fan, i think, and is wary of it being treated like Faulkner or Eliot... well, I'll quote directly:

Often, I think that part - and I mean part - of the attraction of science fiction lies in the fact that it provides a field which, while not actually repugnant to sense and decency, allows us to doff that mental and moral best behaviour with which we feel we have to treat George Eliot and James and Faulkner.

as with jazz, Amis liked the liberation from English middle-class constraint and propriety science fiction gave to him.

I'm sympathetic, though it meant later he would resist adventurous science fiction because he felt it was straining towards the category of 'literature'.

I'm particularly sympathetic to the view stated here, which i feel predominates a lot of science fiction chat and reviewing i see today:

... it would be a mistake to look for any straightforward correlation between the merit or seriousness or readability of a science-fiction story and the degree of concern with political or economic man. Work that for the sake of convenience i will describe as good has been done with situations that cannot be connected with our own by any process of extrapolation or direct analogy.

anyway, that's only some of the tone towards the end - more censorious Amis, if you like. in general the book is written by someone who enjoys very much what he's writing about, whether good or bad, which i always think produces some of the best criticism.

Thanks! If I ever see it again I might pick it up.

Yeah, and I've always wanted to have a look at The Comic Inferno. Never come across any of his (in the boondocks US), but have the impression of a satirical conservative, chronologically and otherwise between young Evelyn Waugh and 80s Spy Magazine, though getting more conservative. so that the last of his and Conquest's Spectrum anthologies, was almost all from 50s Astounding---yet published in 1966, and word to the New Wave!(though it also incl. Ballard's awes. "Voices of Time").
Got that last bit from this appealing article, which also has good links (oh I did somewhere come across his and Aldiss's good conversation w CS Lewis)
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/amis_kingsley Also would like to read his own science fiction short stories and thrillers mentioned in there.

Not really my kind of guy, but seems like he prob had his good bits, esp. earlier on.

the book is written by someone who enjoys very much what he's writing about, whether good or bad, which i always think produces some of the best criticism.

I enjoyed The Alteration, it's sensitively and intelligently written, inventive - the drip feeding of information was well done - with great characters, especially the kids. Until the ending which seemed like a giant fuck you to the reader. the choirboy on the run from his all but enforced castration is on the airship due to take off, taking him out of the country and to safety, when he gets struck down by... testicular torsion! and as a medical necessity has to go back on land, into the arms of his pursuers, and be castrated to save his life.. It's only explicable as an act of God - one character basically says it beggars belief that it happened, and happened when it did, so Amis hangs a lampshade on the implausiblity. Supposedly he hated God, whether or not he believed in him, so perhaps it's a giant fuck you to God, but ends up being one to the protagonist we've been rooting for, to the genre, and to the reader.

oh yeah! i really liked the alteration, but had completely forgotten about that ending. he was very bitter against god, the notion of god and his cruelties. would need to read it again, but it's a rather unpleasantly cynical finish to what has been a delightfully imaginative book iirc.

yet another list: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-sci-fi-books

An interesting list! Lots I've read - some I love, some I loathe. Lots I haven't read or even heard of. At least half a dozen I might try. Of the newer ones I'd recommend In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, which is the kind of book where I have stop every now and then just to appreciate and digest what I've just read.

Re: the ending of the Alteration. It's been a while since I've read it too, but I do remember Amis referencing The Man in the High Castle at one point, and I thought that the Alteration ending could possibly be interpreted as a pastiche of the wild leftfield turn that SF novels like The Man in the High Castle (or the The Space Merchants, another Amis favourite) sometimes take in their final chapters.

Of course I did think of The Man in the High Castle - I haven't read The Space Merchants - and I thought what is it that makes that ending masterful (it's one of my favourite in all literature) and this one ridiculous? The ending to the High Castle really underlines everything you've just read, fits perfectly with the genre, and actually does a good job of destabilising your own sense of reality (if you're that way inclined...). The Alteration ending undercuts and sullies everything you've just read - I think you're right, it could be interpreted as a pastiche, and that shows how unserious it is. Or in short, one ending is about the characters questioning their whole reality the other one is about the main character having his balls chopped off.

and that shows how unserious it is.

Well of course he's a comic novelist, even if I'm not sure that 'comic' is the antithesis of 'serious', at least in Amis' work.

no it’s not, but it’s interesting how his genre approaches fail in different ways, and i wonder if at base there is a conflict between serious and non-serious (rather than comic) - see his comment above about feeling critical approaches appropriate to eliot etc are misguided when it comes to genre.

The Green Man - very good! - isn’t *actually* any good at generating dread. it is very good at the psychological impact of fear and the supernatural on the main characters tho and is a good comic novel.

The Alteration - very good! affectionate etc - maybe struggles with its resolution (now we’re having this conversation i do remember wondering how the plot was going to be resolved - ie castrated or saved). not a comic novel.

The Riverside Villas Murder - not very good! really poor at the enjoyable things in the crime stories he likes - a certain garishness, a certain degree of cutout scenes and people. neither comic nor anything really iirc.

in all of them the pull of what he liked doing - minutely analysing people’s relationships - novels of manners - actually breaks the genre principles he claims to enjoy in genre fiction. at the same time there’s a sort of asserted unseriousness that can trivialise those relationships.

apologies for the amis derail.

I will say I'm inclined to read more Amis, I thought maybe The Green Man.

These Amis ta takes remind me of a review of his Jake's Thing that described a sense of conflictedness, emerging, taking over, the author just having to go w that, or choosing to go w that, rather than forcing a sense of certainty--n that sense, it seemed like it might be worth at least a look, despite some tiresome-seeming kneejerk anti-therapy, and misogyny, both on Jake's part (with pushback from a female character).

(said feedback maybe also a bit canned, as I think the reviewer might have thought? Been a while since I read that review, but *kind of* intriguing)

Moorcock recently posted the he finished his FINAL novel and it ties together all the multiverse stories in a way that made him happy. New fiction onwards will all be novella length or shorter.

More from Tolkien etc. expert Douglas A. Anderson on xxxxxetcpost Dunsany, this tyme re The King of Elfland's Daughter: critic's takes etc, also editions incl. 1969 paperback cover which seems familiar, and a rare dust jacket quote from the author, clarifying the setting---see also many comments, incl from collectors, who send links, and Anderson's responses, also his own links:

https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-king-of-elflands-daughter-1924-by.html

And now:

A Dunsany Conundrum

My Wormwoodiana post of last month, on the centenary of Lord Dunsany's novel The King of Elfland's Daughter, elicited some interesting correspondence from various friends and Dunsany collectors. First, I can confirm that the paragraph by Dunsany I quoted from the US dust-wrapper of The Blessing of Pan (1928), did in fact appear earlier on the flaps of the 1924 US dust-wrapper for The King of Elfland's Daughter. I do not know whether it is on the 1924 UK edition dust-wrapper (but I can say it is not in that edition of the book), so if anyone out there has this dust-wrapper, or has seen it, let me know.

I was informed about another interesting text associated with The King of Elfland's Daughter.

Been looking for this book for a while at a reasonable price and somehow Awesomebooks has a pile of them, I got it in the mail and it might not be as extensive a guide as I had hoped but looking forward to it anyway. I've never read any of these novels and I'm interested to see how they balance genres
https://www.awesomebooks.com/book/9781476675657/the-gothic-romance-wave

An interesting list! Lots I've read - some I love, some I loathe. Lots I haven't read or even heard of. At least half a dozen I might try. Of the newer ones I'd recommend In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, which is the kind of book where I have stop every now and then just to appreciate and digest what I've just read.

― ledge, Monday, 15 July 2024 09:01 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Which ones do you loathe?

Well only one I really loathe - shikasta by doris lessing. Where amis hates god, lessing - judging by that book - loathes humanity. It's something of a recasting of the bible in sf terms and I hated the angels, hated their condescension towards humans when it was their/god's fault we're in this mess.

I was disappointed by a wrinkle in time, I wasn't expecting it to be religious; and the sparrow, which I was expectingg to be religious but wasn't expecting the repeated anal rape of a priest by an alien with a huge barbed member.

hyperion was very silly on that front too - a priest crucified and repeatedly electrocuted for seven years iirc. maybe I should do a poll of violent iniquities forced upon priests in science fiction.

Reading Christopher Priest's 'Episodes' collection. He's a funny one. I've read Inverted World and The Affirmation, I liked the former better than the latter but didn't love it and this collection crystallises my previously vague uncertain feelings about him. He's definitely not a 'what if' sf writer of the old school - his set ups don't drive the plot, rather they're in service of the kind of story he wants to tell and the vibe he wants to create. This means they're often a bit sketchy or unconvincing. Objectively this is fine, I'm not insistent on pedantic world building or against coasting on vibes. But in his case the vibes don't really work for me either, this could be because his characters are all idiosyncratic at best, veering to unpleasant or downright horrible - in this collection we have murderers, self mutilators, eaters of cancerous tumours (!) - and the fact that almost all the stories are written in the first person means that, quite unfairly I'm sure, the negative feelings I have to the narrators rub off somewhat on to my feelings about the author.

Just on In Ascension - I enjoyed it, but not unequivocally. however, the whole space flight section is *incredible* imo.

incredible a bit strong. it’s very good. bit giddy from the crowdstrike outage.

I want to read it again, I remember it as being special but can't recall exactly why or even most of what happened.

It is weird the way the ship goes past all the planets in order as though they’re beads on a string, like a picture in a kids’ encyclopaedia, rather than things orbiting all over the place.

lol, i didn't really notice, but now you mention it. I think the main power of the space travel part is the mixture of claustrophobia, and the way it manages to convey the emotional and mental pressure of travel over colossal distances, and how you periodically hit different paradigms of thought and being as you cross certain lines (leaving Earth - not as big an impact as any of them expect, messages to/fromt Earth still arriving and being delivered after they've ceased to be being created - huge impact) and the imminence of the critical existential and cosmic threshold they're going to cross. I guess the planetary 'markers' helps contribute to that.

But yes, in terms of technology, not really very realistic. Initially I thought 'wait, aren't they slingshotting?' but that is 3 body problem, ofc.

happy ‘parable of the sower’ day

it's not funny 'cause it's true

Hugo short story nominees, in ascending order of preference:

"How To Raise A Kraken In Your Bathtub", P. Djèli Clark - Awkward victoriana, quite badly written. Pantomime villains go about loudly proclaiming their racism and sexism in a way that feels forced even for the era.
"The Mausoleum's Children", Aliette de Bodard - Kinda just reads like a novelization of an action scene? Some decent worldbuilding, not bad in general but not really award-worthy imo.
"Answerless Journey", Han Song - Potent enough space horror, I kept expecting a reveal and it doesn't really come, unless I didn't get it? Author is an interesting one to look up.
"The Sound Of Children Screaming", Rachael K. Jones - Adds an unnerving fantasy element to a school shooting event. Disturbing stuff, really worth a read.
"Tasting The Future Delicacy Three Times", Baoshu - Three moments, all of which come with Twilight Zone twist endings, centered around new technologies in food. Gross and funny and disturbing.
"Better Living Through Algorithms", Naomi Kritzer - Voted for this, which makes me feel a bit self-conscious because it's the entry that most feels like it could be in the New Yorker. But it's great - starts from the premise "what if an app was designed to make your life better, not worse" and doesn't go into any clichéd spaces.

Speaking of xetcpost datedness, and cutting-edge cyberetc. that now looks funny, Vernor Vinge's The Peace War is in part a workaround, an in-joke between author and reader, in that The Peace Authority, who take credit for having rescued what's left of humanity from something horrible that happened in 1997, which they blame on bioscience, and keep a lid on that and all other science and tech (and all "government," by which they don't mean La Familias etc. that they're in league with, the Bosses the PA bosses and depends on)(but they are effective against nationalism per se, or so it seems, which has its own appeal these days of ours), and proudly serve via their own justifiably, reasonably advanced tech---which ain't really so advanced, as they discover, and they even have to get less advanced in someways adapting to the upstart Tinkers, an nerdcore "cottage industry," in the PA's previously satisfied view---and indeed, a Tinker turf cop gets all excited when he finally learns to drive!
Nevertheless, there are leaps and bounds, especially via a kid under pressure, whose Tinker mentor thinks: "He was a first rate genius, and now he's something more." And when the Tinker mentor can no longer follow what he's set in motion, meaning the kid and the Peace War (with his fellow geezer and former colleague leading the PA, both of them obsessed with redemption/justification), it's okay, the kid can use AI impersonation to give orders as the mentor---AI also very useful in hacking PA comm and recon, creating fake news etc: all of this copyright 1984.)
So Vinge has his fun with low/"high" tech, but then he takes a chance on someday looking silly with the next levels, and so far it doesn't, and I don't see how it can.
Also, what could be just pile-up of individuals and factions and concepts and gear and plot twists, also potential gaming scenarios, gets enough nuance, breathing/thinking room, and low-key guidance all the way. Ending is not too on the nose or teasey, and now I'm starting the follow-up, Marooned in Realtime. Somebody has just mentioned the Singularity in passing.
Sorry for the chattery overviews, but plotting is tight enough that getting more specific risks many spoilers.

The Peace Authority has done some good things, and can be seen as "a mild tyranny," as one of its employees observes, but the good has gone as far as it can---maybe among the opposition as well; each side has to change---in a way, it's a critique of two kinds of libertarianism/anarchism, and has me thinking again of Le Guin's The Dispossessed(1974).

xp I read the four available online -kraken, mausoleums, children screaming, better living. I broadly agree with your assessments. The app in better living seems like a genuinely great idea! I'd have liked more detail on how it falls apart - obviously in the same way that the internet did, ruined by capitalism, but I'd happily have read a much more expanded version. And as I used to run an irl drawing group that really did sort of turn my life around, the ending was very relevant to my interests. I'd like to read the other two.

Interesting that it's the two Chibese stories that aren't online! As a voter I got them all sent to me, as well as the entries for novels and novellas which I obv didn't read in time.

*Chinese obv

ysi?

links for the available ones

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/

https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/ - the app one

Reading Tales of Earthsea, it's remarkable how Le Guin can seamlessly re-enter and develop the world thirty years after writing the first one. I'm enjoying her late "only include the words that matter" style - I admire the commitment to cutting it down to the bone without turning into James Elllroy or something offputting like that.

Reading a recent Stephen Baxter and I think he’s actually getting worse.

Was he ever good?